Back

Identification of Gli1 as a progenitor cell marker for meniscus development and injury repair

Qin, L.; Wei, Y.; Sun, H.; Gui, T.; Yao, L.; Zhong, L.; Yu, W.; Heo, S.-J.; Han, L.; Liu, X. S.; Zhang, Y.; Koyama, E.; Long, F.; Zgonis, M. H.; Mauck, R.; Ahn, J.

2020-11-27 developmental biology
10.1101/2020.11.27.401463 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Meniscal tears are associated with a high risk of osteoarthritis but currently have no disease-modifying therapies. Using Gli1-CreER tdTomato mice, we found that Gli1+ cells contribute to the development of meniscus horns from 2 weeks of age. In adult mice, Gli1+ cells resided at the superficial layer of meniscus and expressed known mesenchymal progenitor markers. In culture, meniscal Gli1+ cells possessed high progenitor activities under the control of Hh signal. Meniscus injury at the anterior horn induced a quick expansion of Gli1+ cells. Normally, the tissue healed slowly, leading to cartilage degeneration. Ablation of Gli1+ cells further hindered this repair process. Strikingly, intra-articular injection of Gli1+ meniscal cells or an Hh activator right after injury accelerated the bridging of the interrupted ends and attenuated signs of osteoarthritis. Taken together, our work identified a novel progenitor population in meniscus and proposes a new treatment for repairing injured meniscus and preventing osteoarthritis.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.